Aternity app monitor now covers Web 2.0 apps

Aternity has updated its application monitoring platform so that it can monitor Ajax-styled Web applications as well as 64-bit Java desktop applications, the company announced Tuesday.

Aternity's software monitors applications to see how responsive they are in day-to-day operations. The software aggregates performance data and offers summaries of how well applications are performing.

"This is software that sits on a desktop that monitors the activities of the application," said Trevor Matz, Aternity president and CEO. "It can monitor any application without any knowledge of that application. It uses a unique technology that can see the underlying events in the technology stack."

The newly released Aternity FPI (Frontline Performance Intelligence) Platform version 5 contains a number of new enhancements. Most notably, it is able to monitor performance of Ajax-styled Web applications, those that use JavaScript and the HTML (DOM) Document Object Model for rich interactivity. Previous versions focused on monitoring thick client applications.

"Rich Internet Applications are a new animal, because there is a lot of client-side processing," Matz said. While Ajax is currently supported, the company does not provide support yet for Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight-based Web applications, though support for these technologies may come in future editions of the product, he said.

The program can also, for the first time, monitor Java 64-bit desktop applications. Previous versions could only monitor 32-bit Java applications.

Matz said that many of the company's customers have moved to 64-bit Java applications. "The reason many large financial companies have moved to Windows 7 is that they want to have support on the desktop for extended memory addressing, and as a result, they are taking advantage of the new platform to port their applications to 64-bit Java," Matz said.

The software also provides a deeper glimpse into one of the most widely used enterprise applications, Microsoft Outlook. Previous versions of the software just monitored how swiftly the e-mail client ran. The new version monitors many of the attributes that can slow Outlook performance, such as local database size, e-mail size, number of e-mails in the inbox and plug-in performance.

"You can monitor not just the transactional performance of Outlook, but all the internal performance impacting components that influence transactional performance," Matz said.

Aternity FPI Platform version 5 will be available by the end of June. Typical enterprise installations will start at about US$100,000.

The screen was particularly good. It is bright and visible from most angles, however heat is an issue, particularly around the Windows button on the front, and on the back where the battery housing is located.

My first impression after unboxing the Q702 is that it is a nice looking unit. Styling is somewhat minimalist but very effective. The tablet part, once detached, has a nice weight, and no buttons or switches are located in awkward or intrusive positions.

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